“We’re currently issuing a driver’s license, and we were seeing people come in not only from across the U.S. but from other countries,” Demesia Padilla, cabinet secretary over the New Mexico Taxation and Revenue Department, told Vermont Watchdog.

Padilla, an appointee of New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez, said issuing licenses to illegal immigrants has attracted the interest of international crime rings.

“We’ve worked with Border Patrol and with ICE because our fraud was coming from Mexico, Bolivia, China, the Middle East, you name it. They were coming from Georgia, New York, and Chicago, too,” she said.

According to Padilla, undocumented immigrants pay thousands of dollars to obtain driving credentials.

“It’s very much a for-profit enterprise for these criminal elements. There were driver’s licenses being sold for as much as $4,500. In almost every case, we were seeing that there was a ringleader who had put a lot of the pieces together,” she said.

“They have somebody that’s willing to sell a fraudulent lease, somebody who is willing to do a fraudulent affidavit, somebody who’s willing to collect the mail at a mailbox, knowing the applicant was no longer even in our state.”

Unlike Vermont, which has yet to issue formal charges against anyone, New Mexico has indicted multiple individuals for forgery and conspiracy in running illegal driver’s license schemes.

WHICH IS WHICH?: Driver’s privilege cards look nearly identical to Real ID-compliant driver’s licenses, but it’s the privilege cards that have attracted the interest of out-of-state illegal immigrants.

In 2013, when Vermont debated S.38, which enabled undocumented immigrants to obtain driver’s privilege cards, few opposed the legislation. The bill passed the Senate 27-2; the House approved by a vote of 105-39.

During committee hearings, Vermont lawmakers received multiple warnings the legislation could become a magnet for fraud.

In the report to the House and Senate Committees on Transportation, Mark Williams, former director of New Mexico’s Motor Vehicle Division, reportedly testified the effect of New Mexico’s law had been to facilitate criminal fraud. Williams provided division records that showed a case in which 100 applicants listed the same apartment on their applications.

Wanda Adams, former assistant director at the Driver Services Division in Tennessee, testified that the state’s certificate of driving attracted a flurry of fraudulent residence documents, and was becoming a de facto ID.

Padilla says the problem is so great states have no choice but to repeal.

“Our problem is huge. The thing I can tell Vermont is that as soon as you see a pattern developing, you have to respond quickly and recognize that they find a workaround to any roadblock you put up,” she said.

Padilla advises Vermont prosecutors to go after organizers of the fraud.

“We would call the individuals in to do a face-to-face interview with one of our investigators. It was at that time that they would tell us, ‘I paid so and so for this,’ and they would help us get to the ringleaders,” she said.

“Most of our cases were focused on the ringleader. Our district attorneys were much more willing to take on those kinds of cases.”